Science Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is doing something sly: he’s smuggling a radical politics of survival into the dry grammar of scientific advantage. The sentence reads like a calm extrapolation, but its real subject is power - what kind of beings get to persist when the “scene of life” stops looking like Earth at all. If most of the cosmos is “cold emptiness,” then tying life to “warm, dense atmosphere” starts to look less like biology and more like a provincial habit. The pivot is the phrase “advantage of containing no organic material at all.” That’s not a throwaway technicality; it’s a provocation. Bernal is nudging the reader toward post-biological life: engineered minds, machine substrates, organisms redesigned past the fragile contingencies of oxygen, temperature, and wet chemistry.

Context matters. Bernal wasn’t just any scientist; he was a crystallographer with a futurist imagination, writing in an era when rocketry, atomic energy, and cybernetics were turning “space” from metaphysics into planning. His broader work (and his left politics) often treated technology as infrastructure for new forms of collective life. Here, “independent” is the loaded word: independence from planetary conditions becomes a fantasy of emancipation, but also a warning about what gets discarded when “organic” becomes a limitation rather than an identity.

The line works because it frames dehumanization as optimization. It doesn’t moralize. It coolly invites you to agree that shedding flesh is simply sensible - and only afterward do you notice what you’ve consented to.